Input Volatility, Week 12
Rest of season tiers, game-by-game thoughts
In addition to my normal podcasting stuff which has been a lot of fun lately — good shows on Stealing Bananas and Ship Chasing this week — I had the opportunity to jump on with Jacob Gibbs and Dan Schneier for their Beyond the Box Score series over at my old stomping grounds, CBS. If you’re interested in the types of stuff I’m generally writing about, that’s a good pod where the first half hour or so is talking about some of the macro NFL trends and where we’re at here in the 2024 season, and then the rest was talking through Jacob’s rest of season rankings, which he released in the Friday edition of his free CBS newsletter that I definitely recommend.
Between that podcast and the latter part of I believe the second Stealing Bananas episode this week, I talked through some things I’m playing with about the RB position, and how it’s hitting this year relative to the defensive changes since 2021 (particularly the focus on stopping explosive pass plays), and what that means for the things we need to consider going forward.
Anyway, since I shared some of those thoughts in podcast form in multiple places, I really didn’t feel like writing them all out again, but I’m mentioning them so you guys can hear them if you’re interested. I’ve touched on the short version recently which is essentially that the older RBs that are hitting are all guys who had really strong production in the past, and we know even with RB prospects that being a workhorse and having production is undervalued (as people worry about things like “tread on the tires”), and that as with other positions the idea that production begets production is I think becoming increasingly important at RB, because these defenses don’t really care about tackling and defending the run at all, which is something I really emphasized in talking about Joe Mixon’s long TD in Stealing Signals this week.
These notes probably don’t come as a surprise or anything, and I keep thinking of Alvin Kamara as sort of the poster boy for my point because he’s not generating any of the exciting advanced peripheral numbers, and he’s frankly not even really all that efficient anymore, but the production in the rushing game is still there largely because this is a dude who clearly understands the nuances of the position, uses defenders’ leverage against them to set up blocks, and picks holes and gains yards with those sorts of intangibles that we chalk up to stuff like “vision.” I was reading some of Shawn’s work this week and he was talking about how Mixon is second-to-last or maybe dead last in percentage of runs where he hits the designed hole, so for someone like him it’s maybe less about those things I said for Kamara, but it’s still similar in that Mixon’s thing is when he bounces outside he does try to get downfield (some guys will just go laterally far too long), and he can eat up open space when needed, which has been evident in a career that’s included four 1,400-yard seasons (probably on his way to a fifth this year). It shouldn’t be possible for a guy with no evasive peripherals who isn’t hitting the right holes to succeed, but defenses playing the Texans are even more extreme in selling out to stop C.J. Stroud and Mixon has always had some raw ability despite these limitations that have always made him the type of RB that has underperformed his potential, except now he’s in an environment where his limitations are not limiting.
To be clear, this is all just theoretical, and I haven’t dug into enough data to back any of it up, but I just like to share stuff I’m toying with as I think about it. Historically, my gut instincts on these Ball-Knowing “real” football topics have been pretty solid in identifying and/or explaining some league-level shifts, but this is all more of an offseason discussion and I didn’t want to get too deep into it today.
Today, I wanted to throw out some of the very quick tiering I did at the top of positions to prepare for that pod, as we looked at Jacob’s rest-of-season rankings. These are all full PPR, and I should say I really liked that Jacob took some strong forward-looking stands, because I am always complaining about how we just cling too much to stuff that’s already passed. I do want to say that in my preparation, I looked at things like schedule and whether the player’s bye had passed, but I did default to and lean most heavily on points per game already banked.
One other really interesting note from this week, that Shawn shared with me. He said that if Isiah Pacheco suits up — which he of course will not, we’ve since learned — that all 33 of the most-expensive RBs by ADP would play this week. That includes obviously guys like Pacheco, Christian McCaffrey, and Jonathon Brooks who missed considerable time, and guys like Mixon missed less time but returned, but that’s truly one of the wildest stats I’ve ever heard, that I guess now 32 of the top 33 RBs by ADP were all active (or healthy enough to be active, for those on bye) in Week 12.
(I did dig into this and confirm it, just for the record, and it was using FFPC ADP I believe, where the two RBs at RB34 and RB35 that won’t or couldn’t play this week are Tyjae Spears and Zack Moss, but then there are 18 more consecutive RBs that have been healthy in those mid-rounds, before MarShawn Lynch at RB56 and an ADP outside the top 150 picks becomes the next injured RB. Many of you play in leagues where only like 150ish non-K/DSTs are drafted, and in those types of shallow leagues, there are basically like three RBs that were drafted who are injured right now (and two, Pacheco and Spears, will return next week).
That doesn’t mean there haven’t still been busts, because there have. But truly, that’s not just mildly surprising — it’s one of the most shocking stats I’ve ever encountered doing this. If you told me that only like 6 or 8 of the RBs through pick 150 were missing time at this point in the season, I would have been shocked. To cut that in half, and then some — I’m prone to hyperbole but I truly do find it shocking on a level that I just wouldn’t have been able to comprehend in August even if I could have known it in advance.
One of the biggest things that I told you guys this offseason was that there was going to be late-round RB scoring, and that the rookie RBs in particular were going to be a big part of that. Despite these health trends at the top, we’ve still gotten strong seasons from Tyrone Tracy and Bucky Irving, and then also our favorite previously-lightly-used, might-as-well-have-been-a-rookie Year 2 breakout candidate Chase Brown. That’s one of the things I most specifically find encouraging for the future despite it clearly not working in 2024, in that I think the thesis was more or less sound but also emphasizing that specific idea in builds was disastrous in a year where all the early RB health has obviously meant early-RB builds were strong. People simplifying this stuff to “All you needed to see was rising WR ADPs meant it was time to zig when others zagged” are absolutely not being nuanced enough, because the literal exact same thing was said in 2023 and then 2023 was unquestionably an early-WR season (where some of those Dead Zone RBs were still pretty integral to builds, so it wasn’t necessarily full Zero RB or bust, but full Zero RB did still work if you landed on guys like Raheem Mostert and Kyren Williams).
I’m not trying to relitigate 2023 as much as use it as an example for how other outcomes are possible, which is often difficult to see in real time. People talked about zigging and loading up on early RBs in 2023 based on changing ADP, so at the very least we have two opposite outcomes in the past two years. I am sometimes vaguely critical of other fantasy analysts, and how superficial some of the analysis can be, but this is a spot where I will be very specifically critical, because people making this point are so unwilling to think outside the box of the most recent outcome, that they can’t even go back one single season to see that the exact opposite outcome occurred. It’s truly wild to me, and I can’t be apologetic for analysts missing that point, whoever they may be. That’s just bad.
Anyway, I’ve written this stuff multiple times, but I am continuously asked right now this specific question. It’s the biggest question of 2024, I get it. “Did 2024 change the way we should play going forward or is it an outlier?” is going to dominate the offseason, so be ready for that.
But I wanted to drop a couple specific rest-of-season thoughts, as well. Here’s where my very basic rest-of-season player tiers landed.